Hi,

I’m Doug Ryan and I am the new Executive Director of the Offshore Racing Association (ORA).   I am so excited about joining ORA and helping to unleash the vast potential of the information contained within our Velocity Prediction Program.

Most of the free time in my life has been spent on the water mainly focused on sailing and racing.  I started as crew in Western Long Island Sound in my home town of Rye, NY.  I have had the good fortune of racing in various youth, one design fleets and handicap fleets from the late 70s till now.  The past 25 years I have been racing in New England waters, primarily in the Boston area know locally as Massachusetts Bay.

Despite all the evidence that suggested racing on “Other Peoples Boats” is financially more prudent,  I ran my own campaigns as the owner of a Herreshoff S-Class, Tartan 40, Rhodes 19 and a J80 throughout the decades.  Dedication to this sport we all love has provided me opportunities to actively participated as a Skipper, Crew, PRO, OA, Judge and to serve on the board of Hull yacht Club, Hingham Bay Racing and President of Massachusetts Bay Sailing Association. 

My belief is that the ORR and ORR-Ez rules are the best in the world and are built on a platform that enables continuous improvement.  In the 2022 upgrade to the VPP, our team now can more accurately predict the power of downwind sail design.  When changes like this is made in the VPP, they are tested, proven, modeled and verified before they are released.  All certificate holders gain from these improvements to ratings without any certificate holder needing to appeal for a correction.

Our new performance packages, which were previously only available to the highest tech boats, will now be available to all vessels in our system.  Target upwind and downwind speeds with polars are now available for your boat with your sails in tables and files that can be “taped to the bulkhead” or downloaded into onboard computers.  ORA has now have enabled customers to get performance packages for their boats even if their local fleets are handicapped by another system.

I look forward to guiding ORA’s continuous improvements in our ORR and ORR-EZ Rules.

Cheers,

Doug Ryan

ORA - Executive Director